June 7, 2015
Madame Froment, the woman from La Redorte who cares for Beau when I travel, has had an awful six months. The roof of the house she bought there a few years ago caved in the week between Christmas and New Year's. The house had been represented in the documents of purchase as having no structural flaws, so she had grounds to sue the seller, but that prospect would not put a roof over head last winter. Just before she came to La Redorte Madame Froment left her job as a bank teller in Montauban after diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer. Seeking a quieter, hopefully healthier life, she moved to La Redorte. Divorced, her two sons working far from La Redorte when the house collapsed, she had nowhere to go.
Through a friend, she learned of the convent of Augustinian nuns resident in Azille, a nearby village. She went to see the Mother Superior. The nuns accept guests, but Madame Froment could not pay for her room, so she offered to cook and clean for the convent instead. She and the Mother Superior agreed that Madame Froment could stay for a month on a trial basis.
The arrangement has worked out so well for both parties that Madame Froment has now been at the convent six months. Which I am glad about on a variety of levels: 1. Madame Froment has a roof over her head while she puts her house back together (she has gotten a judgment against the seller, but he is dragging his feet about making payments); 2. someone I value as a great caretaker of Beau has come back into the picture; and, 3. I have been given a window into the life of cloistered religious, which, as I have written before, has always intrigued me.
It turns out that the monastery where the nuns live (it was a monastery before it was a convent), is in the middle of Azille and on Sundays Mass is said there with a priest who comes from the abbey of Lagrasse, 30 minutes away by car. An October 17, 2009 article by Will Heaven in the Sunday Telegraph describes Lagrasse this way:
At first sight, many historians might also struggle to date the Canons Regular of the Mother of God, the religious order which today resides at Lagrasse and has for the last five years. They wear white soutanes and live according to the rule of St Augustine. Their liturgy is traditional, chanted, and in the Extraordinary Form. Yet the order was founded only in 1969.
Indeed, the priest celebrating the Mass is wearing (a) an alb (like a cassock or soutane, but in white); (b) a white lace surplice (a smock), (c) a stole (the priest's mark of office, worn when he is engaged in administering a sacrament), (d) a chasuble (an embroidered poncho), and a cope (a short cape with long sides) over that. He is served by a second priest, an extremely tall and thin young man, and eight altar boys. The oldest of these is tall and thin and so similar in appearance to the young priest, I think they are brothers. (They are not.) He is in charge of the seven other altar servers, who are all pre-adolescent boys.
Like the celebrant, everyone is wearing a white soutane, carefully ironed: one of the altar boys is the designated thurifer and has to swing a thurible (censer) throughout the Mass. Two boys hold the ends of the priest's chasuble where the ends of the fabric meet his shoulders. The purpose of this is so that when the priest raises the monstrance (the grand receptacle for the exposed communion wafer or Host) in his arms in adoration, the fabric of the chasuble does not impede the priest in raising his arms.
Two more boys, each to carry a pillar candle, stand to the sides of the altar. Another rings the sanctus bells during the adoration. The seventh boy passes to the assistant priest at the appropriate moment: (i) the chalice (into which the sacramental wine is poured); (ii) the paten (the dish onto which the sanctified wafers, taken out of the covered ciborium where they have been lying inside the tabernacle,, are placed); and, (iii) the communion plate (a dish traditionally held under the communicant's lips to catch crumbs).
Behind the altar, the nuns were chanting hymns before Mass began. In its urn, placed on the steps below the altar, was an aspergillum, a receptacle which holds holy water made of water and salt that has been blessed. The very back of the small chapel had a balcony passageway through whose recesses (above where the majority of the nuns sat) the oldest of the nuns could be glimpsed moving slowly across during the Mass. --Why? I cannot say, but it was disconcerting.
Corpus Christi, which commemorates the giving to mankind by Jesus of the Host that Catholics believe transmogrifies into the Body and Blood of Christ during the Mass, is always celebrated with all the stops pulled out, but the Mass at the convent is a spectacular example of this. After the 90-minute Mass, there is a procession around the interior of the cloister and its grounds with chanting and the monstrance, carried by the priest and sheltered from the sun by a specially designed processional umbrella, or umbrellino, leading the way. We reach a small altar placed inside a small white linen tent where more prayers are said before turning around and returning to the chapel. The nuns, the priests and the altar servers then disappear into the cloister.
Attending such a long Mass my mind goes in and out of focus, even when it is in English. The Mass I heard this morning was chanted in Latin in the Tridentine form, which prevailed from 1570 through 1962. This liturgy is now used mainly by religious orders I've heard the Tridentine rite once before, in London, at the Brompton Oratory. There the celebrants wear black under their white lace, and the effect is somber. In any Tridentine Mass the priest prepares the Eucharist with his back to the "faithful", as participants in the Mass are called. So the experience of the Tridentine Mass is quite different from that of the modern Mass, where the priest elevates the Host and the chalice before the people. As a result, many believe the Tridentine Mass elitist and excluding, although with the permission of the priest in charge in a particular parish, it can be said without violating canon law.
Celebrants and religious all in white, in a bare chapel painted white; with candles aplenty, sanctus bells, organ, a choir of young nuns, glimmering gilded monstrance and other items, the Latin Mass this morning was a thing of beauty. And a throwback to another era.
There was a homily: it was about the need for chastity. I can't say the message resounded with me. Although perhaps it was not meant to, particularly: the Tridentine Mass I heard this morning I heard as a guest of the convent, not as one of the faithful in a parish church. Then again the truth is that chastity is an intellectual and spiritual challenge for a modern man or woman.
"When I first came to the convent, I thought I was in another world, a sort of fairy tale", Madame Froment told me. "Living here six months, I realize that it is another world, but it is still a world made by humans, with all the weaknesses people outside the cloister have, if not expressed in the same way. The nuns and the priests have their follies and their illusions, just as we do . It's not a paradise at all, it's just a very special way of life."
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